Popular Vote

Lee Cullum
// Published May 9, 2008
in
KERA Public Radio

If there's one thing this country needs this year it is a clear winner
in the presidential election. Nerves are too raw, given the
bank-and-housing crisis, plus the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to
withstand another bout of uncertainty at the polls.

Everyone remembers the acrimony of 2000 when George W. Bush
lost the popular balloting to Al Gore by a half million votes, yet won
election in the Supreme Court after an astonishing display of statewide
ineptitude in Florida. What is less well recalled, if many of us ever
knew, is that Bush, even though ahead by three million in the
nationwide popular vote in 2004, would have lost to John Kerry in the
Electoral College if 60,000 people in Ohio had gone for Kerry instead
of Bush. Once again we would have had a president who lost the popular
vote but nonetheless landed in the White House.

What is relentlessly plain is that the candidates this fall,
whoever they turn out to be, will lavish their time and 97 per cent of
their campaign dollars on just 13 battleground states, down from 24 in
1960. These are states, mainly in the midwest, that are neither red nor
blue. They will be the stage for the strutting and fretting of the
autumn to come, while Texas, California, New York and other populous
places, along with those less well endowed with people (except for New
Hampshire, which is admirably independent) will be merely spectators.
It's not just that commercial media organizations will suffer the loss
of revenue they would love to have, it's also that the issues important
to those parts of the country will be ignored.

Almost nobody likes the current system, created, after all, by a
constitution that had to be built around a collection of states, not
individuals. Otherwise it never would have been approved. The states
were the primary political principle, not the voters. Hence the
creation of the Electoral College which draws support today from less
than 20 percent of Americans. Now a group called National Popular Vote
has come up with to plan to remedy the situation by enforcing the
election of the president in a pure, undiluted vote of the people, a
plan that could be put in place fairly quickly without the years and
years required to pass a constitutional amendment.

It would work like this: Legislatures in enough states to produce 270
electoral votes - the magic number needed to elect a president - would
agree to cast their electoral ballots in favor of the candidate who won
the national popular vote regardless of the polls among their own
people. Already Maryland and New Jersey have adopted this as law, and
it has passed one house in Arkansas, Colorado and North Carolina and
both houses in California, Hawaii and Illinois. It was introduced in
Texas by Sen. Rodney Ellis of Houston and Rep. Patrick Rose of Blanco,
Hays and Caldwell counties.

I hope they persist in the next session of the legislature, and
that others states join the effort as well. The current system no
longer works. It distorts our elections, values some voters more than
others and threatens to undermine the legitimacy of some presidents, as
happened to George W. Bush in 2000. John Kerry would have faced the
same fate if 60,000 voters in Ohio had swung to him four years later.

America needs a president unclouded by questions at the ballot box.
National Popular Vote has offered an imaginative and workable route to
this urgent objective.